I’ve been telling you for years that the employment data produced by the US government were misleading people into thinking the economy was performing better than it really was.

Now Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen — finally! — agrees.

Yellen, speaking before the National Association of Business Economics on Sept. 26, said, “My colleagues and I may have misjudged the strength of the labor market, the degree to which longer-run inflation expectations are consistent with our inflation objective or even the fundamental forces driving inflation.”

That’s what she said.

Internet news sites picked up that statement, but none of the major newspapers did. And the story behind Yellen’s admission and its importance would be way over the heads of TV news anchors — so they ignored it as well.

Yet Yellen’s statement is important as heck. It means that the Fed has been screwing up in thinking that the US economy was, as Yellen has often said, near full employment.

But here’s the kicker — Yellen has been overestimating the strength of the job market and underestimating the amount of inflation in the economy.

The big question is whether Yellen was just misreading the data or whether the data she was reading were wrong. There will need to be years of investigation to determine that, but I’ll give you a clue now.

Anyone who lives in the real world knows that the unemployment rate is far higher than the 4.2 percent that the Labor Department reports. And that the job growth each year — as I’ve been harping on — is mostly driven by guesstimates and adjustments made by government statisticians who apparently don’t live in the real world.

And, of course, the economy has been creating crappy-paying, benefit-lacking jobs that don’t come close to replacing the higher-quality employment that went bye-bye after the last recession.

Last Friday, Labor said the jobless rate dipped in September to 4.2 percent from 4.4 percent in August — and its number crunchers also reported that 33,000 jobs were lost last month.

It blamed the hurricanes.

The experts were expecting the US economy to have added 100,000 new jobs despite the storms.

So instead of being reasonably good, August was blah, with nary a hurricane to blame.

The Fed is in a peculiar position and members of its policymaking committee continue to talk like folks whose GPS keeps sending them down dead-end streets.

But they talk in code, so let me translate.

Yellen and her colleagues keep lamenting the fact that inflation is too low and they can’t understand why — given the alleged strength of the economy. They are wondering to themselves: “If the economy is really as strong as we think it is, why aren’t we getting more inflation, which is desirable in small doses?”

If people were really getting all these jobs, they would be earning better incomes. And if their incomes were growing nicely, they’d be buying things. And if they were buying things, demand for goods and services would be rising. And that would lead to higher prices — aka inflation.

People who live in the real world know not only how weak the job market still is but also that annual inflation is higher than the less-than-2- percent the government asserts.

It’s just that the government works to fraudulently cut the rate of inflation — by supposing shoppers trade down from steak to chopped meat to avoid a price increase. But that way of thinking is nothing but baloney.

We are probably going to find that the US is having a modern version of stagflation — that is, economic stagnation with inflation. That’s the worst of both worlds.

Let’s hope that when the next Fed boss is chosen, he or she will dig deep into the data, wipe the slate clean of what the last three Fed chiefs have done and be honest with the public.

But before then, Yellen will probably do one last thing — raise interest rates in December, even though the data might be causing the Fed to misjudge what the economy is really doing.